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In the provided link, Brandon was very blunt in his opposition to putting Michigan and OSU in the same division because he wanted the opportunity to play OSU twice. He could have shaded that question like he shaded the last-game question, but chose not to. This, in conjunction with his suggestion that The Game can get moved back, leads me to conclude that he willfully hoped that The (regular-season) Game would get moved back, since there now is true motivation to move The Game back so as to prevent back-to-back games.

But even assuming that this wasn't Brandon giving his honest opinion on The Game, then that suggests he acts more like a self-serving politician than a Michigan representative. Then the (weaker) transitive property becomes:

1. Dave Brandon acts like a politician.

2. Some people don't like the way politicians act. Therefore,

3. Some people don't like Dave Brandon.

While people have to be more straw-grasping* to use the Politician label to not like Dave Brandon, it still doesn't require being a sheep of Brian.

*Many politicians act like politicians out of necessity, given that they can't be in a position to do the right thing without kissing ass to certain special interests. Please don't engage me in a political discussion regarding how right/wrong I am on this.

to sell out the date of The Game. Some Michigan fans want The Game to stay right where it is. Therefore, Some Michigan fans don't like Dave Brandon. The end.

This rationale didn't even require one single sniff of Brian's jockstrap.

http://mgoblog.com/diaries/qb-fragility-update

I can get used to advertising in the stadium sooner than the clownification of the football jerseys. Neither of those options is best of all, though.

PS how do i put something in those yellow quote boxes?

The above looks like

<blockquote>PS how do i put something in those yellow quote boxes</blockquote>

in the plain text editor.

My main concerns are:

1) Dear Diary has done an excellent job of linking threads that are worth reading, and every past photoshop thread has been included (Seth feel free to tell me I'm wrong). If images start appearing on Twitter, it is assumed they will either be reposted into threads here (to then be linked by Dear Diary), picked up by BiSB in TWIT, or posted by Brian in UV. Compiling them into Shop Class may already be unnecessary unless this issue spurs MOAR PHOTOSHOPZ. In which case...

2) Quality may be lost from the quantity of recurring this issue. Sometimes images just beg to be photoshopped that produce downright brilliant results (see Taylor's Twosie, the phenomenon that is Lloyd Brady, Brian Photobomb, etc), and if this issue helps highlight more images like those I am 100% in support. I mainly hope that our collective standards of which images deserve to be photoshopped, MS Paint'd, captioned, meme'd or GIF'd don't lower just to create more content. 

Still, Chunkums and Blazefire still do great work, and I like highlighting it if it's as good as what's in this post. Should be interesting to see this issue going forward.

...Michigan is now a football program whose assistants are good enough to get poached by schools like Oklahoma. Given that Hoke and Mattison are both Dline experts, losing Montgomery may be a blessing in disguise.

Well *bleep*, 2013 is going to be terrible. I can't imagine the MGoMeltdowns to erupt in the aftermath of a 4-8 season.

That is all.

I disagree with the continuation that it was the renovations and first night game that brought Michigan into the 21st century, and I disagree with the implication that Michigan was a decade behind modern programs (like Ohio State, given that it's an OSU blog making the statement). Not to mention there are plenty of things I don't want Michigan to do even if it makes them more "modern", like redesign its uniforms, sell out advertising to the extent of OSU, or vacate wins in successful seasons due to NCAA violations.

I did think it was a nice read, with some good insight from the man himself.

This thread is entitled "Rich Rodriguez "Some Michigan Players Felt Entitled"."

until the end of the 2012 football season. This message was foretold here.

.

Don't ever leave

.

then GERG should interview for the position, given that he won the Super Bowl that year as the Broncos' D Coordinator.

I have an extra sad that one such loss was Ohio State.

#MyFeelingsAreImportant

Should I feel disappointed when they only lead by 29 after 39 minutes?

...

Just got an idea for a First-World Problems meme.

He has easily as many Heisman-caliber moments as Desmond Howard in his career, and with the number of individual records he has set (along with the chance to break the QB rushing record in the bowl game), he deserves it. No big ten championship sucks, but that's a team award, and our other Michigan legends didn't have to learn a new system in their career (not at QB, anyway). Given that Denard presided over the team that turned the program from the Rodriguez years into a program with a BCS bowl victory, an Ohio State victory, and a winning record against Notre Dame, Denard has plenty of team-related notables such that his lack of big ten championship should not be the deciding factor.

Most importantly, unless Michigan hires another Rich Rodriguez as its coach, there will never be another quarterback like Denard at Michigan. There doesn't have to be given the amount of talent from past (and hopefully future) Michigan teams, but a runner anywhere near as proficient as Denard with his strong arm will probably not be recruited by Hoke or used as a runner from the QB position. Before anyone mentions how uniqueness is not necessary a legendary trait, I would argue that Rick Leach should also become a Michigan legend (if they're not retiring his jersey) because his career was also prolific and whose career is memorable in its own right. I would also argue that Desmond Howard would not be a legend unless he won the Heisman, which takes more luck than skill and luck should not be a notable factor when deciding future Michigan legends.

Hopefully, responses against Denard's legend status will have more insight than "nuh-uh".

Why hasn't Dave Brandon started selling advertising in Michigan Stadium? It would probably make Michigan more money than another new jersey for compulsive fans to buy. It would probably also create less of an overall backlash than changing the jerseys. (I mean how many places have no advertising in their football stadium? Surely Michigan can do the simple things to keep up with the Joneses AMIRITE?)

Note that I detest both Michigan's frequent changing of jerseys and the idea of selling advertising in the stadium. Yet it's baffling to me that the away (and sometimes the home) jerseys are fair game to change each week while advertising in Michigan stadium is taboo.

THE_KNOWLEDGE does not make predictions.

The boards are easier on people with dissenting views than before because negbangs don't have any lasting effect. Unless you call "reduced karma" a punishment, but it seems like many readers read collapsed posts anyway, especially to make sense of responses that aren't collapsed. So yeah, it's definitely untrue regarding Hoke being beyond criticism. 

But my point is that posters should get judged for what they post now rather than what they have posted before, since people can and should be allowed to change their ways. In this thread, HD focused exclusively on the now rather than the past, which people can self-moderate or respond to without the mods needing to step in and diffuse a political/Rodriguez debate. I have a strong feeling that this was Profit's rationale behind why he didn't try to diffuse HD here, and I do agree with him. Yet it seems that, because HD's past involves meltdowns about RR's firing and ANGAR in general, you want enforcement on this thread towards HD, not the posters that are TRYING to stir the pot when citing his past Rodriguez-firing meltdowns. It's not like HD hasn't been punished before; he was nuked pretty hard by the mods in at least one instance.

Crazy laugh in MGoPodcast 4.4, plus I can imagine him telling us "You're all going to show your true colors when the chips are down (when Michigan-OSU gets moved into early October). See I'm not a monster; I'm just ahead of the curve."

75-63 Michigan

called 'F-star'. It's given out to any OSU student athlete that will give their teacher sports equipment/memorabilia, and transitions an otherwise GPA-counted failing grade into a pass on a pass-fail scale.

#TPryor'd

Go Blue!

that vote is even worse (11-1/13-1).

"Kovacs" was very low on that list.

Next thread.

or a

Homonyms are two separate words with the same spelling and pronounciation, like the noun and verb versions of "fly." Homophones only share pronounciation, like with "eek" and "eke."

#GrammarPolice

...failed. LINK

It's gotta be a pain to come from celebrating Michigan's 2012 12-2 Big Ten championship season and Rose Bowl victory, just to find an alternate universe where Denard's elbow explodes and Michigan loses 3 games. May I hope that the future from whence you came is unaltered, while I hope that Michigan's season isn't doomed.*

*The last time THE_KNOWLEDGE made his farewell was in 2010.

Did it work?

is Disney snatching more of Brian's people up.

#StillBitterAboutTomVH

Michigan gets 3 TDs, and Purdue gets 3 1-point safeties from the extra-point attempts; these are the irregularities that THE_KNOWLEDGE has foretold. Michigan also adds 2 field goals and a safety, while Purdue gets 3 field goals.

Afterwards, Michigan cruises to an 11-3 season, with Michigan winning the Big Ten but losing to Arizona in the Rose Bowl.

2 of those wins (ND and Sugar Bowl) were about as improbable as improbable wins come by, and weren't really influenced by the offensive gameplan. Also, last year's schedule was very favorable, with the only marquis road game being MSU and playing down OSU and okay Nebraska teams at home.

OTOH, the offense looked brilliant against both Nebraska and OSU last year, which Borges deserves credit for.

are not garbage yards, regardless of how much you desire them to be.

That was a chuck-and-pray attempt that had absolutely no impact on the outcome of the game, because the alternative was to essentially take a knee. So really there was only 5 turnovers of significance.

to this year, you're right. But if he's as good as he was last year at throwing the ball, we figured out a way to turn a loss into a win BECAUSE of the jump ball against Notre Dame. If the latter, the coaches should have let Gardner/Funchess make a play against a weak secondary. If the former, Hoke needs to get a better quarterbacks coach.

"If it exists, there is a porn for it."

Good work Blockhams for existing enough for Rule #34 to apply.

Linked the original thread. Blackgandhi definitely outdid him/herself with this one.

during the 2010 season. Vincent Smith got plenty of carries in 2010, but wasn't anywhere near the threat that Denard was when running the football (hence why they stopped running the zone read with Denard and Vincent). I'm not sure why you can pin that on Rodriguez's inability to coach, given that he didn't have a 1000-yard rusher in addition to Denard just waiting to get put into the game. Rodriguez ran Brandon Minor and Carlos Brown plenty in 2008 and 2009 when, you know, they were the best runners on the roster.

Note also that Rodriguez had Tate Forcier in the wings, so it was okay to run Denard more in 2010. From that standpoint, only a 15% reduction in carries is a failure on the new coaching staff, who didn't have a solid backup QB that could step in for Denard (it should have been more like a 50% reduction).

The reason the App. St. game is made such a huge deal of on this board is because it is populated by a lot of anti-Carr types.

No, the reason the App State game is made such a huge deal of on this board is because Michigan was a top-5 team with national title hopes that lost to an FCS team. Feel free to reread Brian's UFR of that game for specific reasons why it was outrageous. Especially the defense, which schemed right into App State's brilliant Goliath-beating gameplan of "run basic zone read plays with less-talented players."

Look at the other thread about Carr advising Weinke to go to Iowa. The "Carr did the right thing to put the players first" comments are plussed much more than the "Carr was wrong to undermine the program" comments. Case and point.

but nothing that you cited is actually a crucial plot element that the entire movie is hinged upon. Without the Ewoks and their ability to win the Battle of Endor, Return of the Jedi falls apart. Hence, the Ewoks are the more egregious error. Lucas initially wanted to use Wookies instead of Ewoks, which would have been easier to understand the Rebels' success. However, because he wanted to make more money by appealing to children, he sacrificed quality.

More relevant are arguments pertaining to the strong characters from Jedi versus the weak characters and dialogue of Revenge of the Sith. The reason why I dismiss this is because there was very little character development in Return of the Jedi; the main characters had already grown to their max in the other two movies (which were better), while Revenge of the Sith was actually made worse because of the mistakes made in Episodes I and II. Meanwhile, Revenge of the Sith puts Anakin in the role as a tragic hero from a Shakespearean tragedy, where we know where the story starts and stops before watching the movie yet hope 1) he doesn't become Darth Vader, and 2) most of the Jedi don't get killed off. In a vacuum, this is a much more compelling story arc than what Return of the Jedi has to offer.

I thought Revenge of the Sith was better than Return of the Jedi. It's close, but the workings of a Shakespearean tragedy has to be taken more seriously than the best legion of stormtroopers getting defeated by a bunch of teddy bear-like Ewoks.

to the Hall-of-Fame. Hopefully this will reduce the number of questions about why he stopped posting a month ago.

Our field goal kicking was fairly decent in 2009, when Olesnavage went 11/15 on field goal attempts, including 9/10 from 30 or more yards. But yeah, 2010 was awful.

while managing to lose all its other games, the universe will tear itself apart.

We're gonna need a whole lot of these:

because the NFC Norris allows them to exist.

I am leaving work.

I can't contribute much now.

Next time start sooner.

then writing an abstract for another conference. Then...

I'll let you know after looking at the pictures on my phone.

4 fakes out of 5. Article says most NFL teams allocate 1.08 seconds of snap time for the long-snapper.

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d80c1a406/article/steelers-gaffe-br...

Does his job involve public relations, like, at all? Or is he simply trying to maximize revenue? If the latter, then he should be selling advertising in Michigan stadium because that's a free source of income for the athletic department. If there's even an ounce of public relations in his job description, then calling out naysayers for preventing Michigan from "being relevant" doesn't help him accomplish this goal. 

Hoke is in his fifties; his age was one of the concerns fans had about him being hired. I support him 100% as Michigan's coach, but Hoke is not young.

Your other points still stand, however.

So dinner then drinking.

Currently, you have to be a mod to successfully lower someone's point total.

...those uniforms looked ugly for reasons pertaining to, you know, how they looked rather than a strawman reason such as their performance on the field.

All it would take is a new tv contract with ESPN to get these, since Disney owns the rights to both.

if "the biggest upset in sports history" were to happen again, Michigan would be the winning team this time around. So I can't help but hope that history repeats itself. I wonder what 2-word phrase would be used to describe that level of jubilation; the best thing I can think of is "The Day Muppets Crashed MGoBlog."

with "The Process" that made it suboptimal (even if Hoke turns out to be the next Bo Schembechler-level idol at Michigan) is the resulting recruiting class that Hoke was forced with in 2011. While it wasn't the half-filled smoking crater it easily could have been, it was still the worst-ranked recruiting class Michigan has ever taken in the star era.

Had Hoke been something less than amazing in the first month, the class is probably unranked and players would have been more likely to transfer. OTOH if Brandon had known Hoke was going to succeed as much as he has so far, he could have hired Hoke sooner and allowed him to obtain an even better recruiting class in 2011. Thus, "The Process" was flawed, but only time will tell before it's known how "The Process" affected the 2011 recruiting class. 

This is probably the perfect response that doesn't attempt to recognize vacated wins while still honoring the Fab Five for their impact at Michigan.

Now time to log onto my fake profile and criticize this opinion that Dave Brandon gave while twirling my thin moustache and dropping kittens off bridges while giving my meniacal laugh... I mean go back to work.

in a thread about selling Michigan adhesive tape in Ohio. In addition, 'rivarly' is spelled wrong in the title.

Ohio State will be playing a meaningless season as the result of being on bowl probation. A Michigan win there has the stakes of "Michigan didn't lose to OSU," which is admittedly big in the eyes of Michigan but less big than years where OSU is also contending for a Big Ten Championship. If OSU is favored then The Game gets bigger, but as of right now Michigan is favored since OSU will be learning a new system.

Alabama is coming off a national championship win riding the SEC high as the best team in the best conference in the country. Michigan will go into that game expected to lose for various reasons mostly attributed to great recruiting and oversigning by Alabama, giving them a more talented roster. Winning that game, however, would be bigger from a national perspective than beating OSU because Michigan would then be looking at a possible #1 ranking with big ten title and national championship hopes.

Saying the Alabama game doesn't compare to the OSU game next year is ludicrous. Unless you think there is essentially zero chance Michigan beats Alabama. If that's the case it sends an awful message to the nation that Michigan is too cheap to commit its financial resources that it SAID IT WOULD COMMIT to support its own football team.

I hope that a big-money donor doesn't bail out Dave Brandon here. If Brandon makes a public statement saying the department screwed up the budget and didn't account for the band, I would probably be more forgiving and hope that a Ross-type comes forward to pay for travel expenses. Until that happens, I'd prefer it be the good will of Brandon to make it all better with the pile of money he's receiving to even play this game.

Though it's finals weekend at Michigan and the weather is nice outside. Either Dave Brandon is an evil genius bent on keeping Michigan fans distracted from his master plan to screw the band over or there are plenty of outside forces to keep Michigan fans from feeling outraged. Tomorrow is another day, however.

Edit: Did I seriously need a /s tag for that?

Michigan normally has 9 away games in a 2-year span, with the band attending 3 of them. That is, 1/3 of all away games that Michigan plays in has the band in attendance, which is more than the 1/4 that you cite.

When you assume one bowl game each year (reasonable given that we're not making a major transition), and that fraction increases to 5 out of 11 (nearly half).

When you take into consideration that this game will give about as much exposure for Michigan as the UTL game, there is a lot of incentive to have the band at the game.

It's definitely possible to have percentages greater than 100 because he was citing an increase. Any quantity that more than doubles will increase by more than 100%.

</7th-grade math lesson>

Michigan easily gets placed in the top 20 all-time best basketball programs in the country. In fact, if Michigan doesn't have basketball tradition, neither does MSU because historically the two teams are essentially equivalent to one another after vacating the Fab Five and including Izzo's run as their coach.

BEAT OHIO! (surprised Michigan is not a 3-seed)

Michigan was ranked in the top 5 with national title hopes when The Horror happened, while Michigan was projected as a 6-6 team at best when the Toledo game happened.

Blanket statements like "The offense was bad against good teams" are the reason why MLive exists. Brian takes the time to UFR each game to figure out just what the team is good and bad at doing. Using the information that he obtained from his analysis in 2010, he concluded that the offense was great at moving the ball forward against every team Michigan went up against last year (against Mississippi State, Michigan was about average), which boded well for Michigan if the following 3 things happened in 2011 (in a theoretical year under Rodriguez):

1) Michigan gets better starting field position, reducing the number of yards Michigan's offense needs to score points,

2) Michigan improves its field goal kicking, reducing the number of empty possessions, and

3) Michigan turned the ball over less.

Of these, only (3) can be pinned directly on the offense, which Brian decided could have been a problem with the coaching/scheme but could also have been a problem with having young players playing at skill positions (*cough* first-year starting QB *cough*). Ergo, Michigan's offense was very effective and had the potential of becoming elite in the near future.

You OTOH cite an "obvious pattern" of "not putting up any numbers" which, like, what? What are these "numbers" you're talking about? Touchdowns? I guess; since Michigan fell behind, they must not have been scoring points. Yet Michigan still had plenty of sustained drives against even their most difficult opponents in the first half of games but did not score touchdowns due to the above 3 factors. So from my--and Brian's--point-of-view, Michigan sustained plenty of numbers throughout every game against every opponent. Ergo, Michigan's offense was very effective.

WE LANDED ON THE MOON!

I tried clicking the link and it said "Page not found." I mean I have no memories of what happened that day; perhaps the game was never played.

just to see what creative versions of "Cool Story Bro" would be posted. So far, not bad.

Vodka + OJ.

Only anonymous testimony is given from the players in the book regarding the transfer paper meeting; this is what I am citing. If a player did come forward in the book, it wouldn't matter because it sounds like you would not believe it since the book has enough flaws to be construed inaccurate and incapable of direct citation as a historical source. If this is true, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

My opinion is there is enough circumstantial evidence to believe most players at Michigan committed to play for Lloyd Carr rather than to play for Michigan, so using transfer papers to motivate a player to work harder only works if you're still the coach. If you're not the coach and you use the phrase "This isn't what you signed up for" to precede the offer to sign transfer papers, this is not a motivational tactic.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man. I'm not going to try to change yours; I expect you to do the same with others.

Start a thread that bashes Rodriguez for not attempting to convince Denard Robinson, the army of short slot receivers, and the plethora of players recruited to play in his offensive system to transfer from Michigan. Wouldn't that have been in "his players' best interests and wishes"?

This thread probably violates Brian's ban on Rich Rodriguez-related threads. Despite the title being about some guy named Loyd Carr, many of the words in that giant column of text imply that it's about Lloyd Carr with respect to Rich Rodriguez, which is still about Rich Rodriguez.

or for advancing a sex abuser's career? Sadly, the main reason it will probably be the former is because his death occurred so close to the Sandusky scandal.

I think Hoke has changed the tide of the Rivalry. Hell, people in Ohio are starting to believe him. Never in a million years would I have imagined that. Selling Michigan jerseys [and beating OSU] is a good start.

Football gives each team 3 timeouts per half for a total of 6 timeouts for a 60-minute game. IME basketball could have 4 timeouts for each team for 40-minute games. However, anything beyond that would be hard to justify, especially since basketball has a naturally faster tempo than football.

Now what if they further limited timeouts to 2 timeouts/half like football? This might make the last minute of basketball games not take 30 minutes, which isn't unreasonable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKUOB8MN4Kc

Seth will always be Misopogon in my heart, for the same reason that Lloyd Brady will never be able to live up to the legend if his identity is revealed.

The current system is designed to moderate the content, while the old system was designed to moderate the users. Moderating the content should work in theory, but the issue comes with determining how many downvotes are required to collapse a post. Then, when a post gets collapsed, there should be no incentive to read the collapsed post because that's the whole point of having this system. This means the current system has 2 problems with it:

--The threshold to collapse a post is too low, even for people with good (2) karma.

--After a post was collapsed, readers have 2 reasons to read the collapsed post anyway; to make sense of any replies to said collapsed post, and to judge if the post was rightfully collapsed (often; this wasn't the case as given by the low threshold).

To fix the current system, the threshold to collapse a post needs to require more downvotes to ensure enough readers want it collapsed (I actually think a dynamic threshold would work best), and, once a post gets collapsed, it should be unreadable to anyone, along with all posts that replied to it. If this is too difficult to enact, going away from the current system would also work.

OTOH, the old point system gave users an incentive to add something useful and/or worth reading to the board/comments in that they could amass enough points to unlock additional privileges on the website. The downside to this system is that unpopular material was often viewed as inappropriate material and downvoted instead of refuted, and point inflation due to unnecessary posbang threads. While these was a real problem, the point of self-moderation is such that neutral parties or people in agreement with the negged user can act to prevent wrongful negging. Thus, a giant negbomb shouldn't be the result of "I disagree" unless it showcases user ignorance.

The only way I can see to completely prevent wrongful negging and useless point inflation is through moderator interference such as removing all point swings from a thread or removing and penalizing a user for starting posbang threads. Also, negs have to be free.

because that date maximizes the number of digits that look like Hoke's pointing finger...

...and Dave Brandon didn't want to wait until 11/11/11.